The new evangelization needs to take on the sexual revolution if it has any hope of making an impact anywhere in the Western world.I believe everything that the Catholic Church teaches in her Catechism.

Monday, September 26, 2011

John C. Wright has written on a telly show set in a Playboy club. In his examination of the show and some of the statements made by one of the actresses, he makes it very clear just what women have given up by embracing contraception and postfeminism.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

I use and prefer free software, including several variations on GNU/Linux. This article suggests that operating system vendors may request (or demand) that the next version of Trusted Computing, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, be used by hardware manufacturers to lock out any OS other than the one shipped with a system board, and that acting to bypass it would be a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This one, by a Red Hat dev, has more technical and better information.

Could it happen? Certainly. Microsoft makes most of their OS sales to system manufacturers like Sony, Dell, HP, and Gateway. In fact, people are more likely to buy new hardware to handle the latest version of Windows than because their computers no longer do everything they want. Will it happen? I don't know. IIRC, Microsoft has been slapped down in court for trying to prevent people from using their computers as they wish, and suits to end this would almost surely cite that precedent.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

I was watching a John Stossel clip, "The Commandments According to Penn," in which Penn Jilette discusses his book, "God, No!" He is a fundamentalist atheist along the lines of what Mark Shea encountered here, in that he expects the Bible to be read in a flat-footed, literalist manner.

I can agree with Penn that "agnostic" is a non-term. He claims that those who do not have an active faith, i.e. one where you trust God to keep his promises, then you are for all practical purposes an atheist. I agree with that, because trust is a major connotation of "belief" as it is used in the Bible. But beyond that, his theology is absurdly weak.

One of Penn's earlier silly statements was to the effect that "anyone who doesn't run a stop sign is displaying doubt, because a real believer would expect God to save him from all harm." He's buying the argument that the devil presented in Matthew 4:6, that God will send his angels to rescue us lest we dash our foot against a stone. Somehow he not only failed to notice Jesus' reply to this, but also doctrines saying that governments have authority from God to protect us, e.g. with stop signs and traffic laws.

God wants us to choose Him. To think that we should obey Him like mindless automata (or that we are unable to choose because of God's omnipotence) is to say that anyone's love for God is actually God's act of masturbation.

A later silly statement comes in the form of a favorite atheist straw man. "If God commanded you to kill your child, would you do it? If your answer is no, you've just put love and humanity above religion." And yet from the Catholic perspective, God = Love, and Love can nearly always be used as a substitute word for God. This understanding makes Penn's argument so irrational it almost cannot be described with symbolic logic. The closest I can come is, "If A is not-A, and you fail to behave as if not-A is A, then A is not-A." God asking or commanding me to murder my child is not God, because it is not love.

Of course he'll say, "Then what about Abraham and Isaac?" First, Abraham didn't know as much about God as we do. As far as I know, God never told Abraham that human sacrifice was repugnant to Him. Second, the Midrash strongly suggest that he was convinced that God would resurrect Isaac from the dead after he had been sacrificed. And third, God has never required human sacrifice from us; the only human He ever wanted to be sacrificed was His own Son, Jesus Christ.

The first of the Penn Suggestions is this:

1: The highest ideals are human intelligence, creativity, and love.

There's nothing wrong with any of these ideals, especially not love. Love is the greatest of all virtues. But to say that human intelligence, creativity, and love are the highest ideals is idolatry. Both intelligence and creativity can easily be turned against love; furthermore, those who have less intelligence and creativity are necessarily devalued by this suggestion.

Finally, I'd like to know the philosophical basis from which these ideals spring. I see a clear line of deduction from the Christian valuation of all human life made in imago Dei to Penn's First Suggestion, but as a self-respecting atheist, he ought to find some other basis.

If Penn really wants to learn about Christianity, he really ought to read the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Comment Policy

Comments are moderated. First, because this helps me find new ones. Second, because I've had comments that were nothing more than a means to link to a business site of which I do not approve (e.g., "Nice blog" or "Nice post" with the link in the commenter's name or the post itself).Third, because some comments are personal attacks. I don't tolerate that crap. In fact, it was an anonymous F-bomb directed at another commenter that motivated me to enable comment moderation.

License and Attribution

All of my good works are possible only through the grace of God. In other words, they are gifts given freely to me by Him. Thus, all attributions are to God. And since He has given all so freely to me, how can I then selfishly not share His gifts with others? Thus, I impose no license on any of this work, and declare it all to be in the public domain.

Those who derive from it are on their own, legally, morally, and spiritually, though I will pray for them all, and ask Our Lady of Perpetual Help to do the same.

About Me

Catholic libertarian. Where the two conflict, Catholic tends to win. I have a website and an old blog. While my intent is to focus on heroes and heroism, that will not prevent me from ranting about whatever thoughts are so recurring in my head as to be annoying.